I didn’t manage to make it to the post office over the weekend, but I did send out all the packages for the manga giveaway today. So people should be getting their manga next week. Drop me a line and let me know if you like the books or not 🙂

Mae Mai linked to my wiki in a recent post, which was nice, but my wiki is in stasis right now. I haven’t had the time and energy to keep developing it recently, and it never attracted a critical mass of people to keep it going with new content. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. I go in and try to clear out spam now and then, but that’s about it. If I have more time in the future, I might resurrect it. Or I might spend my time adding more information to the Comic Book Series Wiki.

There haven’t been many posts recently about the wiki, mostly because it has fallen into stasis. I’m doing a bunch of project management and committee stuff at work, which makes me less likely to work on developing the site when I’m at home just because my brain is tired. But the wiki has really gotten hit with spam over the past couple days, so I’m going to spend some time cleaning it up. I hope I’ll have more time to work on it though when things are less hectic.

I’ve been turning my attention to some of the underdeveloped pages on the wiki recently, I’m trying to collect review links on the Indie and Art Comics page, and even though I have a ways to go, hopefully it will be a good resource when it is done.

Precocious Curmudgeon runs down manga releases in June, Antique Bakery certainly sounds cute, but I wonder how many manga titles about baking the market will bear. I’d be curious to take a look at the Yakitate Japan! manga if it ever gets translated.

Shawn Fumo on the CMX Tenjo Tenge editing uproar. This does seem like a mistake for CMX. I don’t think it makes much sense to edit down an adult title to a teen level by drawing on extra clothes, etc. Either label it 18+ and shrinkwrap it, or get the rights to a series that is more in line with the editorial direction of the rest of properties published by CMX in the first place. Of the few (Madara, The Swan, Land of the Blindfolded) CMX titles that I’ve tried, I do really like Land of the Blindfolded. I’m not the target audience for Tenjo Tenge, and I would never have bought it anyway.

Street Angel page up to promote the Comics Festival book. Discovering titles like Street Angel is one of the reasons I like reading comics blogs. I also actually picked up an issue of the new Legion reboot after reading so many posts (good and bad) about it. These are things that I probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own if I was just browsing the store.

This might change soon but look how high the wiki appears in searches for certaincomics.

I made the first level pages on the wiki only editable by registered users. There have been a few attempts at wiki spam over the past couple of days, and I’d rather not have to deal with it too much. We’ll see if this helps. I’m going to try to update some of the semi-neglected pages on the wiki over the weekend. A few pages I think are in first draft status as opposed to rough draft. The Horror Comics, Fantasy Comics, Crime and Suspense, and Manga pages aren’t looking too bad, and there are some good links on the Autobiographical/Non Fiction comics page. I hope to be putting more original reviews on the wiki as well as linking to online reviews for each work.

If anyone out there wants to help with some of the underdeveloped pages on the wiki like World Comics or Indie comics, that would be fab. I’d like to have some good content on those pages, but I don’t have much background myself when it comes to those types of comics, so I’d be flailing around a bit when attempting to organize or improve those pages, just due to my own lack of knowledge.

I upgraded the knitting blog to the new version of wordpress and didn’t run into any major problems, except I accidently deleted the stylesheet I’d been using for the site and my RSS feeds started 404ing. The fix for the feed issue is described here, and the fixed header file is here. I’m probably going to take a few days to play around with wordpress 1.5 on the knitting blog before upgrading this site. I do have a sense that the new version is uber-nifty but I haven’t taken the time to explore all the features. I don’t mind the new look of the dashboard, but I’m going to wait to upgrade the wordpress blog we use at work for a little bit. I think that all the ongoing information about wordpress development displayed on the dashboard (the first screen you see after you login to the blog) would be a bit distracting for librarians who just need to login, make a quick note about an issue, and logout. So I’m hoping I’ll be able to customize or simplify the dashboard for the work blog. It looks like someone’s already written a plugin to repress the feeds from displaying.

Over at the wiki, the first instance of spam happened when I was on vacation. You can see what happened in the history page for fantasy comics that was vandalized. I was really curious how long it would take for someone to spam the wiki if I didn’t have many controls on who could edit the page. It didn’t take that long, and I was able to quickly restore the old version of the page. I might go back and make some of the pages alterable only by registered users. A couple people other than me and Nat (Look at Nat’s martial arts movie collection! It reminds me I should watch some Sonny Chiba movies) have been experimenting with the site, and once more of the structure of the wiki is in place, I hope to start posting more original reviews, and have other people post their own reviews as well.

The work wiki that we’re going to be using for our department’s reference manual is going full steam ahead — a student worker is going to be transferring over the content. It’ll be interesting to see how we end up using it when it is up and running for real. There weren’t really any major problems when we started to blog, so I’m hoping the transition to the wiki will be just as smooth. Lishost has been a great place to host the blog and wiki for work.

On the Comics4LibrariesWiki, I liked the way that Nat set up the Fantasy Comics page, and I think we’ll try to duplicate that organization across the site. I’m wondering though if once the lists are too long, it would be better to have an individual page for each title which could be organized and grouped by the wiki categories function of the software.

Other things possibly in the works: registering a domain name, and setting up an amazon associates account (proceeds from people buying through the wiki could be donated to a cause like CBLDF).

It looks like everyone at work liked the basic install of MediaWiki that I put up as a sample of what an electronic reference manual could look like, so we are going to go ahead and start transferring over the content in our old binder soon. I’m writing up a basic “how to add content to the wiki page” because even though MediaWiki has great documentation, for the purposes of the reference manual project we are only going to be using a small set of features.

Over on the Comics4Libraries Wiki, a couple pages are under more active development. Nat is adding links to the Autobiographical and Non-Fiction comics page. and I’m adding a few informal reviews and links to the Manga Page. If you look at the Wanted Pages for the Wiki, you can see some of the orphan pages with no content, if you wanted to jump in and start editing. One thing about the Wikka Wiki software used for Comics4Libraries — it uses camel case for internal linking and creating new pages. So if you edit a page and type in a word with mixed capitals and lowercase like VForVendetta, a link to an empty VForVendetta page will be created. Then you can start adding content to that page. This does create a bit of a problem though, as orphan pages are created for normal words that have upper and lower case letters in them like McKean.

Late-breaking-tip from the comments on this post: But the problem is solved when you add double double quotes to the words you don’t want to turn into a link. I really need to read documentation before blogging 🙂

Even though I’ve asked people to register to edit the wiki, (and when your register, your name has to be in the CamelCase or WikiName format of mixed upper and lower case like FanGirl, LibraRian, I think) just because it would be easier to keep track of what’s going on, there currently isn’t any restriction on any of the wiki pages — you don’t have to register to add content to the pages. So if you feel like it, try it out 🙂

I set up a wiki for work today. We’ll see if people in my department want to use it as a way of putting our reference desk manual into electronic format. I decided to use MediaWiki for the work wiki — it does have tons of documentation, I wanted to try using additional wiki software, and I think it might be a little bit easier for my department to use. Some of the features (like LaTeX) are not going to be used at all, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to repress those options from the editing interface. The wiki installation process is SO EASY! If you know how to transfer files to a web site, have MySql and PHP, and the word “chmod” does not sound alien to you, it only takes a few minutes to set one up. Really, if I can do it, anyone can.

I still dig WikkaWikki for the Comics4Libraries Wiki, and hopefully any future other contributors (hint, hint) will like it as well. I’ve started putting a few reviews (modified and copied over from this site) on the manga page (scroll down)
Thanks to Greg and the netbib weblog for promoting my new wiki! Once there’s more content up there, I might try to hype it more, just to see if more people would like to contribute to it.